'The Two Trouser Jakes ' ('The Two Jakes'- 1990)

The Two Trouser Jakes
or...
Hey Jake, This Aint Exactly 'Chinatown'

Both writer Robert Towne and American film icon Jack Nicholson (as Jake Gittes) are back in 1990's 'The Two Jakes', but you'll find little else to remind you of Roman Polanski's brilliant noir masterwork 'Chinatown' (1974). To begin with, Nicholson as director is no Polanski, and writer Towne is no longer the spot-on Robert Towne of 1974. Nicholson reprises the role of Jake Gittes, now 20 years older, and the portly owner of a successful detective agency. Harvey Keitel is on hand as Julius 'Jake' Berman, a scheming Los Angeles developer who has hired Gittes, and his firm to follow his much younger wife Kitty. Berman believes Wife Kitty is having an affair. It appears Berman is right, and Gittes soon informs Berman that Kitty has arranged for an assignation with her lover at a skidrow B & BJ. Kitty is played by Meg Tilly, who is once again inexplicably miscast as an attractive woman. With Gittes and his henchmen audio-taping in the next hotel room, Berman breaks in on Kitty and her lover. To the vast annoyance of Gittes, Berman empties a revolver into Kitty's lover- Berman's partner Liberty Bodine. Rot-ro.

Tilly, with her eerily shining Down's Syndrome eyes and ridiculous child's voice, makes an unlikely femme fatale, and Keitel takes a role meant to be played wooden and renders it petrified. Madeleine Stowe is feisty, and gorgeous as Lillian Bodine- the sultry widow of Jake Berman's partner. Lillian thinks that Jake and Kitty Berman had contrived the affair to kill her husband so that Jake might then claim the beneficiary survivor status outlined in a convoluted partnership agreement. Stowe is brilliant as the dysfunctional Lillian, and as she worms her way close to Gittes to press her case, Stowe lifts an otherwise pedestrian film with her considerable screen presence. There's a incendiary scene in Gittes' office in which Lillian becomes hysterical, and Gittes is forced to console the grieving widow with Stowe in an obliging four-point stance murmuring... 'You're gonna make me do it. You're gonna make me do it."

'The Two Jakes' is no 'Chinatown', but even when every now and again the plot soils itself in horrifically grotesque fashion, Nicholson the actor has sufficient charisma to keep us munching popcorn. Also in the film is veteran character actor Eli Wallach as an attorney with the obligatory 40-weight patina. David Keith plays the vile detective Lt. Loach as beta foil to salted alpha dick Gittes. As an oil tycoon, Richard Farnsworth delivers his trademark Machiavellian huckleberry and Ruben Blades rounds out the cast as token Latino. Nicholson himself lends a credible narrative voice to the film- a sort of wistful, unrequited narcissism. If a bit unsteady at the directorial helm, Nicholson eventually skippers us to familar harborage- every so often the Past insists on kicking us in the ass...hard.